SAT Brain Teaser: Can You Solve It?

Here’s a nice math brain-teaser to start out the week. It seems that our friends in China have come up with a mind-bending animation that seemingly shows you can create extra area in a figure by deconstructing the figure and putting it back together in another configuration.

We know that mathematically and physically, that can’t happen! So click to watch the animation below and try to figure out where the “trick” in the animation is. You know how on the SAT, figures are often “Not Drawn to Scale?” First five people to come up with the correct answer and comment on this post will receive a Veritas Prep T-shirt or a copy of SAT 2400 in Just 7 Steps!

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2 thoughts on “SAT Brain Teaser: Can You Solve It?”

the pieces, when rearranged, do not fit as neatly as suggested by the graphic. there are slight deviations from a perfect rectangle, which means that length times width is only a good approximation of the area, not the area itself.

The trick used was the manipulation of the lines.
A substantiation to such claim is evident as the red line in
the rectangle looks fairly more obvious than that of the square.
The lines amount to the additional square.